6423=A Rose

There is some great smelling going on in Cambridge, Mass. It has to do, among other things, with spices. One of the most difficult things to reproduce in the laboratory is a spice. A natural spice is an extremely subtle blend of many ingredients, and the absence of even a trace of a key ingredient may make a big difference in odor and taste. Therefore, attempts to find out how to synthesize spices by chemical analysis have not been successful. But an inventive Cambridge chemist named Ernest Charlton Crocker has just produced three synthetic spices very close to the real thing--nutmeg, cinnamon and white pepper. In so doing, he has used only his remarkable nose and taste buds.

Chemist Crocker, who is pioneering a new science of the senses, works in the top-flight Arthur D. Little industrial laboratory.* In classifying his vapory perceptions, he reduces all odors to four basic ones: fragrant (e.g., animal musk), acid (vinegar), burnt (roasted coffee), caprylic (goaty or sweaty). Each is further classified in eight degrees of strength. These basic smells in various combinations make up thousands of different odors, most of which Crocker can recognize at one sniff.

What's in a Name? In analyzing smells, Crocker sniffs for each basic component, like an orchestra conductor listening for specific instruments, then describes the total effect by numbers. Thus, the Crocker description of a rose is 6423, representing the relative strength of its fragrant, acid, burnt and caprylic components, respectively.

To synthesize nutmeg, Crocker analyzed the natural spice with his tongue and nose, then tried hundreds of chemical combinations to get the right shades of odor and flavor. The result was a compound of more than 40 different ingredients, including several varieties each of phenols, alcohols, esters and aldehydes. All these were mixed in a meal ground to nutmeg's consistency.

Apple or Onion? Crocker's interest in analytical smelling began when he worked with odorous gases in the Chemical Warfare Service in World War I. He has since applied his uncanny skill to many an industrial smelling problem, from perfumes to inks. Once a manufacturer of metal heating utensils showed Crocker a sample, asked why it smelled bad. Crocker sniffed, then astonished the manufacturer by describing accurately all six stages in the finishing of the article (washing with kerosene, buffing with a cotton polisher, etc.).

The human nose is an extraordinarily sensitive organ: it can detect as little as a billionth of a milligram of an aromatic vapor; the tongue needs at least a million times that amount in order to taste.

Crocker has found that flavor and smell are more closely related than most people heretofore realized: if one holds his nose, for example, an apple tastes much like an onion.

*The Little laboratory, just to show it could be done, once made a "silk" purse out of a sow's ear.

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